You might think that any film-maker taking the brave step of putting Lindsay Lohan and porn star-turned-thespian James Deen in a movie together might want to ensure at least one of them was front and centre in the debut trailer. Not so Paul Schrader, director of The Canyons, which is scripted by Bret Easton Ellis, perhaps because the film has only been shooting in LA for a couple of weeks, after the project recently secured funding via the crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

Instead, the trailer delivers a scattershot montage of California images, set to the Dum Dum Girls' Coming Down, suggesting, perhaps, that the City of Angels will be as prominent a cast member as either of the film's more obvious draws. The Canyons is described as a "contemporary LA noir". It centres on "the dangers of sexual obsession and ambition, both personally and professionally, among a group of young people in their 20s, and how one chance meeting connected to the past unravels all of their lives, resulting in deceit, paranoia, cruel mind games and, ultimately, violence".

Deen's involvement naturally recalls the LA-set Rebel Without a Cause, another film about young people seemingly trapped in a pattern of unnecessary cruelty, while Schrader appears to be returning to the world of hard-hearted, sun-drenched, west coast cynicism he depicted in the 1980 film American Gigolo. Easton Ellis's screenwriting efforts have thus far fallen far short of his literary achievements, notably with the misfiring The Informers from 2008, based on his own 1994 short story collection. The Canyons sees the creator of American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction (both realised well on the big screen, but based on screenplays that Easton Ellis did not have a hand in) writing directly for a film for the first time.

Lohan and Deen both seem cut from the perfect cloth – one soaked in tarnished glamour – for an Easton Ellis story, and Schrader is a film-maker of undoubted repute. Might this be the first time we see the maverick storyteller's vision truly realised successfully on celluloid? Or are you expecting a movie that resembles the abrupt end of one of Lohan's more unfortunate turns behind the steering wheel?